Stasi

Stasi, official name Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (German: “Ministry for State Security”), secret police agency of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The Stasi was one of the most hated and feared institutions of the East German communist government.

The Stasi developed out of the internal security and police apparatus established in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany after World War II. The law establishing the ministry, whose forerunner was the Kommissariat 5 (modeled along the lines of the Soviet KGB), was passed by the East German legislature on February 8, 1950, four months after the establishment of the German Democratic Republic. The Stasi, whose formal role was not defined in the legislation, was responsible for both domestic political surveillance and foreign espionage, and it was overseen by the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Its staff was at first quite small, and its chief responsibilities were counterintelligence against Western agents and the suppression of the last vestiges of Nazism. Soon, however, the Stasi became known for kidnapping former East German officials who had fled the country; many of those who were forcibly returned were executed.

Under Erich Mielke, its director from 1957 to 1989, the Stasi became a highly effective secret police organization. Within East Germany it sought to infiltrate every institution of society and every aspect of daily life, including even intimate personal and familial relationships. It accomplished this goal both through its official apparatus and through a vast network of informants and unofficial collaborators (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), who spied on and denounced colleagues, friends, neighbours, and even family members. By 1989 the Stasi relied on 500,000 to 2,000,000 collaborators as well as 100,000 regular employees, and it maintained files on approximately 6,000,000 East German citizens—more than one-third of the population.

In addition to domestic surveillance, the Stasi was also responsible for foreign surveillance and intelligence gathering through its Main Administration for Foreign Intelligence (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). Its foreign espionage activities were largely directed against the West German government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Under Markus Wolf, its chief of foreign operations from 1958 to 1987, the Stasi extensively penetrated West Germany’s government and military and intelligence services, including the inner circle of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–74); indeed, the discovery in April 1974 that a top aid to Brandt, Günter Guillaume, was an East German spy led to Brandt’s resignation two weeks later.

The Stasi also had links to various terrorist groups, most notably the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany. During the 1970s and ’80s the Stasi worked closely with the RAF and cooperated with Abū Niḍāl, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (commonly known as Carlos, “the Jackal”), and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Stasi also allowed Libyan agents to use East Berlin as a base of operations for carrying out terrorist attacks in West Berlin. Following the bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin (April 1986) that killed two U.S. servicemen, the Stasi continued to allow Libyan agents to use East Berlin as both a base of operations and a safe haven.

Soon after the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the East German legislature passed a law to reconstitute the Ministry of State Security as the Office for National Security (Amt für Nationale Sicherheit). However, because of public outcry, the office was never established, and the Stasi was formally disbanded in February 1990. Concerned that Stasi officials were destroying the organization’s files, East German citizens occupied its main headquarters in Berlin on January 15, 1990. In 1991, after considerable debate, the unified German parliament (Bundestag) passed the Stasi Records Law, which granted to Germans and foreigners the right to view their Stasi files. By the early 21st century, nearly two million people had done so.